


Pick Up the Pieces and Go Home (the Rulers Make Bad Lovers Remix)

by Red



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Canon Disabled Character, Forced Crossdressing, M/M, Music, Nail Polish, Post-Canon, Remix, Stolen Moments, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 17:12:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2118126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red/pseuds/Red
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the summer of '77, Charles waits in another stolen afternoon for Erik to speak his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pick Up the Pieces and Go Home (the Rulers Make Bad Lovers Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [a_q](https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_q/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Take Him By The Hand](https://archiveofourown.org/works/441655) by [a_q](https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_q/pseuds/a_q). 



> With ample apology to a_q who'd probably like something else remixed (sorry, I'd been near done... and to the other anon, great minds think alike!). 
> 
> Even more apology to anyone who has ever heard _Rumours_ on continuous repeat. 
> 
> If you'd like the soundtrack, [here you go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvVznAb9-Ss). Thank you to a_q for the lovely original fic and to Fleetwood Mac ~~for eventually making _Tusk_~~.

Lifting the needle from the groove, Charles flips the record. 

It is far easier, he’s found over the years, to bear Erik and his incessant fidgeting when one has a soundtrack. 

Only better that it be this. The constant noise of Erik tapping his fingers halts momentarily. He shifts on the sofa, sighing heavily as the opening beat of “The Chain” comes through the speakers. 

Erik could very well stop him. Charles hasn’t any more hold over Erik than he did five years ago, than he did a decade before that. Erik could stand, there’s no bonds on him, not for now; he could leave the room, could get his cape and helmet and retreat the mansion entirely. 

Hell, he could just reduce the record player to a useless heap of melted components. Charles knows he dislikes Fleetwood Mac enough to at least be tempted. 

Telling, then, that Erik doesn’t do anything more than this: sit on the sofa, legs crossed primly, thinking _quit stalling_ loud as possible. 

Charles ignores it all, humming along with the music as he heads over to the sidebar.

“You know,” he says, straightening the glasses, “Always best just getting it over and done with.” 

The tapping pauses again. There’s a rustle of fabric, Erik fussing with his clothes. It’s difficult, resisting the urge to turn. 

“You’re in my head,” Erik growls, and Charles smiles to himself. 

“Well. Naturally.” It goes without saying. There’s children in the mansion. If Erik wants to drag his sorry self through a window, he can damn well put up with the supervision.

There was a time when Charles kept his distance, when he held Erik’s privacy as sacred. 

Been ages, since then. He’s got the students to think about now, the safety of a whole generation of mutants in his dubiously capable hands, and if he’s learned nothing else about Erik over the years, he’s at least finally caught on to the fact that Erik fancies a nice display of power. 

Erik is seething, his mind heated. The sofa creaks. 

“Then _read_ it,” he demands, and then, as if it’d actually win Charles over, “Please?” 

Charles laughs, decides he can at least give in to the temptation to look. He wheels backward, turning from the sideboard to admire Erik. 

He does look splendid. Compliments to the designer and all that, although to be fair, Erik has always cleaned up well. He’d slunk in dressed as always, like some sort of absurd character from a comic book, adorned with more than a few cuts and bruises. 

This time, he submitted quite easily to Charles’s wishes. 

The master bath has been converted for fifteen years. Charles regrets often that he couldn’t keep the tub, that spatial constraints and the limitations of old plumbing demanded they rip it out and set the shower in the vacancy. The tub was an antique monstrosity, clawfooted, slipper-shaped with a long sloping back. And while Charles misses the tub itself, he misses seeing Erik soaking in it even more. 

But there’s little use, he's discovered, wasting life on meaningless regret. Erik still kneels nicely enough, scrubs up just as well—better, really—under the spray of a handheld shower as ever he did in the tub. 

And he dresses up as pretty afterward, too. 

Under the attention, Erik looks down. The hand not on the armrest of the sofa reaches down, tugging needlessly at the dress. There's no fussing about the hem, it reaches clear to the ankles, the fabric stretched over his thighs. The style these days seems to be heading toward something less fitted, more billowy, so perhaps the outfit is a bit outdated. Charles has never professed to be an expert on fashion, he just knows what will fit Erik. With the breadth of his shoulders, halternecks are always a practical buy; with the narrow curve of his waist and the bulk of his chest, the conforming stretch of a knit ideal. Erik doesn't fancy the style, the orange and brown and yellow mess of chevrons, or the itch of the fabric. He fancies silks, dark tones, the classic excesses Charles draped him with, once upon a time. 

Charles cares little. Twelve bucks including shipping, get the same result. Frivolity, like privacy, is only wasted on Erik. 

"You know I won't," Charles says, answering the request. Every time, Erik asks, as if he forgets that there's no pleasure in simply taking that which he suffers so much to give.

On the couch, Erik shifts again. The tap of his fingers is constant, near maddening. Charles waits for him, one song playing into another and another, 

_finally baby_  
 _the truth has been told_  
 _now you tell me that I'm crazy_  
 _that's nothing I didn't know_  
 _trying to survive—_

And Erik breaks. He crosses his arms, crosses one knee over the other. The knit stretches, accommodating, the sense of a digging scratch pulling along the underside of one thigh. 

"It's unnecessary," he starts. "Frivolous."

Already, Charles knows what he’ll request—has done from the start—but the word gives him pause. He glances down at Erik’s feet, the high boots Charles has zipped up on him, visit after visit. His gaze tracks upward, following the coarse pattern of earthy colors drawn out over the tension of Erik’s body. 

“What isn’t,” he asks, frowning, considering Erik anew. 

“What isn’t unnecessary,” he absently continues, as Erik says nothing, “what isn’t frivolous about any of this?” _About us_. 

Twelve bucks is still twelve bucks. He orders a new dress after each visit, predicting the next. 

“It’s worse than this,” Erik says, oblivious. He’s not making eye contact, staring somewhere high on the wall, where the last light of day casts patterns of yellow and amber. 

On the record player, the last song begins. 

“I want you to—” he pauses, glancing back. “To paint my nails,” he finishes, quick and pressured. “If you have anything, that is.” 

Without a word, Charles heads to the desk, fetching two things. The old Sears catalogue, to catch any mess—he’s not done this before—and a bottle of nail polish. 

It’s glittery, a gold that won’t match. When he first takes Erik’s hand, he's trembling, just a bit. Charles holds him tight, presses at a torn cuticle with the edge of his own rough thumbnail. Erik’s hands are scarred, callused and worn as Charles’s. 

The first layer goes on too light, a scarcely discernible sheen. Erik’s holding his breath. Dipping the brush back in, Charles blobs it on heavy, drags it up from bed to tip like he’s seen girls do. 

“This stuff is wretched,” he complains, working now on Erik’s left ring finger. He’ll probably need four coats for it to look like anything, but Erik is still as stone, staring at the near-invisible progress. He says nothing, taking Charles’s words as they’re meant—background noise, inane as the tapping of fingers, and Charles paints the next two nails in silence, listening to the end of the record. 

When it fades out he raises Erik’s hand to blow on the fingers he’s finished. Six to go. 

“I suppose you get what you pay for. At any rate, thank you."

He considers offering up something, some sort of reward. But only he’d want Erik to decide, and every last choice here is a struggle. Erik’s very presence is, alone, effort enough.

"Thank you for asking.” 

Letting go of his hand again, Charles turns back to the record player. Erik mutters to himself, not quite loud enough to hear, and Charles turns the album back. 

He sets the needle down again, skipping the first track. This song is forever on the radio right now, at least in the States. Erik’s annoyance is a pleasant buzz. 

These moments they have never last for long. Returning, Charles hums as he works on coating Erik’s left thumbnail in broad, clumsy strokes. 

There are more tricks than telepathy to make a day last. Dressing Erik, doing his nails in cheap gold with the last rays of a summer sunset coming through the window—it can go on for an eternity, can serve as its own reward. A spot of light and warmth, small and bright and perhaps a touch embarrassing, in a dark frozen night spent alone. 

Charles has used Erik’s powers before. Drawing the brush downward on Erik’s ring finger, Charles decides he might just use them once more when the song’s through. To lift the needle and replace it, to play this song again, and again. Stretch the moment like Erik’s patience, like the knit of a twelve-dollar dress. 

To make certain that decades from now—if, somehow, somewhere, this song is still being played—all Erik will remember is this day, this moment when the song will repeat, when Charles will sing along under his breath, rusty and off-key. 

_now here you go again,_  
 _you say you want your freedom_  
 _well, who am I, to keep you down?_


End file.
